The House of Breathing Page 5

  When we finished our stories we lay back in the dark. Night insects could be heard. The breeze had increased and seemed to bring with it a visible increase in blackness. Later, when they thought me safely and soundly asleep, I heard Patrick and Afonso move close enough to embrace.

  And in my lonely singularity I contemplated the connection between us all, the connection of space, the connection of narrative. As I heard Patrick’s lips upon Afonso’s body (or was it vice versa?), I tried to imagine the ways in which the individual kiss and all its individualising implications might be installed and respected in the larger occurrences of a country’s history. And simply could not.

  V

  Do you know this history? Let me be brief. From August to December 1975 East Timor was governed defacto by the popularly supported Fretlin movement.

  East Timor declared itself independent on the twenty-eighth of November: nine days later Indonesia unexpectedly invaded, engaged war with the local people and took control.

  In the next eighteen months of conflict one hundred thousand people, or one-sixth of the population, were killed.

  Portugal was preoccupied with internal affairs. Its army and its people were riven in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary contestation.

  Requests for diplomatic help from Australia against unprovoked aggression and the denial of national self-determination were met with dithering disengagement. East Timor was unimaginable and therefore considered inconsequential.

  Fretlin fighters were driven to the vaccinated highlands where they engaged (knowing the cliffs and rivers, the serpentine roads) in guerilla warfare. They lost.

  Patrick Donelly, my friend, was with a group of five Australian journalists who, seeking frontline dispatches in that miserable territory, were confronted in a surprised moment by Indonesian machine-guns only to discover, pathetically, that no protestations of nationality deflected bullets. His brutalised body was burned in a pit. He was reduced to ash with dozens of others, who, though still remaining nameless to outside intelligence, were no less loved, no less specific, and no less precious than he.

  Afonso Vieira, hearing the news from the safety of his Portuguese villa, sent me a letter of grief smudged over by apparently unrestrainable tears. A year later a note arrived from the city of Sintra, the city of castles. It was from an old friend of Afonso and stated, with rather too strict a tone of impersonality, that he had committed suicide.

  VI

  Sometimes in the summer I wear my Timorese sarong and think of the women in the stone market place who through some intrinsic dignity and the extra aid of narcotics resisted the misappropriating gaze of the soldiers. This continues to preoccupy me, the evidence of resistance, this imperturbable solidity.

  I remember that, as a tourist, I wore a pair of reflecting sunglasses by which I carried, with bland incomprehension, doubled images of the country in little screens upon my face. Doubled highlands. Doubled soldiers. Doubled peasants or mauberes.

  I remember too that there were masses of purple bougainvillea in severely bright light. There were pockmarked buildings on the verge of disintegration, jungles, wild deer, Fretlin supporters on trucks, a statue of the Virgin colonially dislocated, a certain doctor’s face.

  And there is another small detail which I irresistibly recall, but pause to include since it seems too obscurely symbolic for this fact-seeking prose. Yet it is a detail of precisely that clarity of punctilious emplacement that I long to record.

  There is a bridge in the centre of the Eastern half of Timor which is incomplete. This is not to say that the builders did not finish their work, nor that it collapsed in some area or other. Rather, there are two concrete arcs—designed in Portugal by map-consulting engineers—which begin on each bank of a broad brown river, stretch forward to meet, both in their strong bows, but then, through some stupid or unfortunate miscalculation of space, fail entirely to join. In the dry season this monumental mistake is ignored, since the riverbed is empty, and one may walk safely across the absent water. But when the wet season comes flimsy ferries are employed, and each year people drown, are swept swiftly seawards under the concrete arms, cursing as they go.

  The Precision of Angels

  Mary’s mother was a Literalist. Nightly she bent above the Book, halo-ringed and brightened by her desk lamp.

  She pursued substance. She sought the verifiable. She read, and in reading conferred actual existence, rendered words responsible. Her hand slid down and across each light-white page, tracing with sure fingertips the neatly sequential lines of the real. Entities arose. Events. Essences. Nothing was dubious. In the long dark hours, so otherwise unsure, so filled with intimations of unGodly appetites, truant devotions and unspeakable acts, Mary’s mother was wed to the true.

  The crescent moon elevated, opaque clouds sped, stars began unwinding their Heavenly revolutions.

  In her fortieth year, when her daughter, then eleven, became afflicted with epilepsy, Mary’s mother began to specialise in the study of angels. The vision Mary presented was too shocking to ignore: it was a vision of creatureliness. The child’s body convulsed and her limbs became errant. A sweet face was remade in a series of contractions and contortions. Violence of some kind agitated crudely and extensively in every physical space, muscles, chambers, the very planes of the skin.

  Astonished at this unseemly and unprecedented aberration, this triumph of Devilish caricature over innocent solemnity, Mary’s mother sought out a scriptural explanation. She knelt beside her daughter—who was still heaving her mind out of her wracked condition, bruised, abased, bleeding slightly from the tongue, moist and stained with her own leaked urine—and declared with certainty a theory of visitation.

  It may be, she suggested, following the theories of St Jerome, the work of fallen angels who, unlike their more righteous and ethereal cousins, have bodies of damp air and visit inconveniently and with malicious purpose. Then again, she pronounced, it may be an angel of the avenging kind. As the Book of Kings attests, one single angel is able to exterminate overnight a whole army of Assyrian warriors; but there are of course many recorded cases of lesser molestation. Either way, she continued, you must undertake penance, since such obvious punishment shows you definitely to be sinful.

  Mary lay on the floor looking up at the unconsoling face of her mother and behind her a windowful of changing night. She thought to herself how little she knew, how empty she was of knowledge and understanding. But she knew this much: that nothing of her condition verged upon the metaphysical, unless it be the glimpses of forewarning stars lit randomly in her head. These stars blazed up, momentarily scintillated, and then were eclipsed by a flood of blood and the bold spasms of seizure. Mary did not tell her mother of the presence of the stars; she held it a secret within her, private, precious.

  Mary’s mother spoke of angels with pedantic precision. As she attacked her spaghetti she told her daughter the details of their modes of locomotion.

  Of the nine orders of angels, she pronounced between mouthfuls, the seraphim, the highest order, are likely to be the swiftest. According to Isaiah they are equipped with six wings, two on the face, two on the feet, and two with which they principally fly. Remember, however, that as spiritual essence, angels do not take up any space.

  At her mother’s description Mary smiled to herself. Unlike the usual tales of plague and revenge, sin and catastrophe, this one seemed to indicate an order of comic plenitude. She imagined a being, miraculously spaceless, stepping from a luminous backdrop of winking stars. It was pompously unangelic, being stuck all over with the still-flapping bodies of a dozen glued birds. One bird had alighted on the back of the head, and cupped the obscure face like outsized ears.

  She cherished this image as children cherish, before adults, their own lies and misdemeanours.

  After a difficult attack Mary opened her eyes to find her mother very close and anxiously inquisitive.

  Are
there voices? she asked. You must tell me about voices.

  Mary closed her eyes. She felt her skin becoming livid with its past exertions, felt the embarrassing wet, the pain, the dishevelment. She was inordinately tired, and wished only to lapse into dream-vacant sleep. But she heard her mother’s voice imperiously continue:

  St Paul, of course, speaks of the ‘tongues of angels’, but there is some keen dispute as to their means of communication. They can address humans intelligibly, as Gabriel did at the Annunciation, but otherwise may talk by pure intelligence. According to St Thomas angels open their minds to each other in a perfectly mutual and wordless revelation. Does your angel speak? Is it in English? Latin?

  Mary feared to look, knowing she would see what she saw at first, her own prostrate form, swimming, doubled, tinily reduced, in the globes of her mother’s interrogative eyes.

  Mary’s mother began dying in her fiftieth year. No less Literal than before, she lay back on her bed—having refused a hospital—and awaited angelophany, an angelic manifestation.

  There are so many, she said; the prophet Daniel speaks of thousands upon tens of thousands. Surely one will be spared to guide me Home.

  She continued with her Book, her finger careful and specific beneath each single word, her eyes tight and concentrated in an industrious squint. When the pain became too great Mary read to her mother, and as night drew on she positioned the desk lamp so that it brilliantly illuminated the text.

  I may visit you when dead, the mother said one night. St Frances of Rome, who died in 1440, saw her dead son Evangelista return as an angel. He had remarkable hair, composed of a flaming, holy, incisive light, right down to his shoulders. His mother could not look at him without hurting her eyes, but was ecstatic at his visits. She was able to read her Bible by the hair’s resplendent glow, and its light was such that it enabled her to know the thoughts of men around her, and to understand all the devious machinations of the Devil.

  Mary looked down at her mother, who had become grey and shrivelled with approaching death, and was unable to conceive of any illustrious return. Thin ashen hair fell in trails on the pillow. The face was reduced, barely still her mother but some stranger who had stolen her mother’s voice. The stranger died unvisited, murmuring in whispered fragments that the angel who deigned to visit St Francis of Assisi carried in its hands an ancient violin.

  After the long slow death, daughter Mary divorced her past and sought her own recuperation in the consolations of the flesh. She undertook a career of earnest concupiscence, finding with men a derangement of the senses unexpectedly pleasurable.

  It was a night full of stars when the event occurred. Her lover moved in the dark, skilfully attentive, supple, fluent, tacit and tongue-gentle. He touched and he entered and as she spread apart her thighs she felt the concurrent and interior beginnings of a flutter of featherlife. Wings began to beat and blood to rush and for a second Mary thought that her epilepsy had returned. But the wings continued uplifting, a rhythm, a flight, until, without a doubt, horizons subsided and the angel was entrenched. There was a luxurious suffusion, a voluptuous loss of breath, so special as to be certainly, quintessentially celestial. Mary heard herself panting with the force of possession, felt the translucencies of the life of the sky, felt the breeze of another presence ebb and dissolve.

  When her lover switched on the lamp and knelt beside her at the bed Mary saw her own image. In the limpid hemispheres of his beautiful eyes she was doubly floating: glorious, naked, almost beatific. And before her, outside, splendid and far, was an extensive realm of space now wholly sidereal.

  The angels known as seraphim, she whispered very low, are generously endowed. They have three pairs of wings, one on the face, one on the feet, and one with which they spacelessly speed.

  Dark Times

  I am not courageous. Now that the country is brimful of assassins I lie awake at night. I start at shadows. I fear the phone. The faces of friends appear furtive and changed. A smear of blood in the hallway, crimson as rose-flourish and oddly indelible, augurs huge alterations.

  The meetings of our group were always rather small. They consisted of a few of my graduate students, most of whom were working away at irrelevant theses (and thus, in the narrow range of student temperaments, either studiously earnest, arrogant or shy), and my fellow historian M (temperamentally all three and, engaged as he was in a perpetual project of indefinite scope, similarly word-burdened). We bent over documents and considered them together.

  As scandals go this was insubstantial. A local politician had siphoned off funds intended for road works. He was related, of course, to the ruling family, and possessed, of course, a private militia. In addition he conformed to the familiar caricature, khaki-and-dark-glasses, copiously bodied, nasty, brutish and rather short. He was, that is, nothing unusual at all, a codified personification, formulaic, severe.

  Yet I recall, that night, that I seemed actually to apprehend this politician’s presence in my room. Fear curiously substantiates. We sat close together in our small bulb-lit circle, clustering like conspirators in some cinema classic, and he might almost have been present as a seventh member. And if he sat anywhere he sat beside me: I could sense the space at my elbow claimed and inhabited; I could feel the hairs of his invisible arm brush ever so softly, like a contagion, against mine; I could hear, or so I thought, the very beat of his terrible heart. The smoke of his cigar joined our cigarette haze; his hot breath commingled. The State of Emergency had produced this effect, had rendered incarnate evils otherwise removed at the image-safe distance of newspaper photographs and billboards.

  We paused at our work for black tea and pitted dates, but the palpable presence did not dispel.

  When the door burst open I was almost unstartled. Men with batons swung in through the room, bringing with them the sudden taut urgency of accidents. The light globe swung too, taking our shadows into monstrous elongations, sliding dark, elastic phantoms up and down the walls. I watched my own form rush back towards me, and waited, impassively, to be struck out by steel.

  Tea tipped and spilt; a brass tray spun skywards.

  They took only M. After a few bold concussions they took only M. From terror or bravery he had remained in his chair, but they seized him instantly upwards and sent him hurtling away. His body fell through the doorway and came to rest heavily inanimate and askew in the hall. His head had exploded in a crimson rose-flourish. He was perfectly still. Then the men efficiently bundled their limp, bloody bundle, and were gone.

  When the wide-swinging light came finally to rest I could still sense a presence stirring air at my elbow. But the panting I heard, so thick and inhuman, was only my own.

  I remember Cambridge. I was younger then. I walked between stone and trees and bright glassy shops and was utterly disbelieving. The English amazed me. Clothes. Manners. Their stiffened smiles. Their strict punctuality. The men with hands perpetually in pockets. The women with hats and hard-substanced handbags. I thought for a time that I was the only one real, that the population I moved in was white enough for ghosts and almost as insipid, but in the end was persuaded by their solidity of touch. After books and study and long nights alone I submitted my colour to the tremulous affections of many pale fingers. Both women and men. On moonlit sheets I cast back my body; I reclined, was embraced, and became the exotic by which they generally defined me. I confirmed passivity or surprised with novelties; I assumed the many and various forms of my figurative foreignness.

  By day radiant pages flicked fan-like before me, their words neat and black, and absolutely certain.

  In this tense waiting time it is difficult to read and almost impossible to write. The journals of my discipline begin to repel me. For all this country’s chaos mail doggedly continues; history journals, new books and sky-blue lettergrams still fly across the ocean to land upon my desk as though nothing had changed.

  Today at the riot there wer
e five television cameras. Tomorrow my friends in England will see a scramble of people, a few swift trucks and the distant advertisement of guns. (Crowd scenes, military, perhaps a number of conscientious and shocking brutalities.) In the casual and lazy fraternity of pubs they will imagine adventure. Several will write lines on sky-blue paper to express solidarity. More will turn instead to the comprehendible horrors of the late night movie.

  I shuffle my books in simulation of work. I fiddle with papers and scribble a paragraph. The very word ‘history’ begins to torment me. I change and re-change, unable to concentrate, my article on subaltern class formations. From outside comes the acrid smell of burning cars, and, somewhere within it, persistent traces of musky incense drifting upwards from the temple.

  Darkness descends. I fear the darkness. Outside beggars bed down under blankets of cardboard. From my window I can see them nestling in tight little corners, or snuggling, paper enclosed, against the walls of this building. They curl up like commas and hope for dreams.

  Since M has been taken nights are almost unendurable.

  It is foolish, really, the things one remembers. I was seated in a cafe, playing colonial-acting-English, on a day, I recall, untypically static and warm. It was the day of my very first Devonshire tea. Such sumptuous blandness!: the scones plump and dusty with a coating of flour, the jam shinily viscous and chemical red, and there, on the splendid willow-pattern plate, a huge mound of cream. The tea was presented in a miniature teapot of fine beaten silver; beside it stood a jug and bowl similarly fashioned and lit for the occasion by a stream of lemon sunlight. The domestic aesthetics were most alluring. I plunged at the scones with unwarranted greediness.